Heroic Fortune - Mechanic

[Joshua Kitz]

From the some of the playtesting I've gotten the feeling that some folk find the potential 'wildness' of the dice mechanics a little troublesome.

This and thinking of how I should have used the free CanGames dice at the recent convention of the same name, (they're 6-siders with 'CanGames' icon instead of a 1).

Heroic Fortune
Whenever making a talent roll (wherein there is more then a single die) the hero includes a Fortune dice. This die should stand out from the rest in some fashion. If the Fortune dice rolls a one the player can set the die to any value.

Example: Thunderfist attacks The Granite. Thunderfist rolls a 4,4,3,2; Granite a 4,3, and his fortune dice come up 1. Ordinarily this roll would have resulted in two points of strainpoint damage to The Granite, however he resets his fortune dice to 4 and takes no damage.

The Heroic Fortune rule should generally only be used by protagonists. It serves to represent the difference between those who choose the easy path or crime from those who choose to the harder path of altruism. It also represents the twist of fate that makes these characters stories worth telling, what makes them more resilient than other potential heroes who fall in their early days.
This being said, some GM's may choose to provide certain Arch-Nemesi with a Fortune dice to make these conflicts a little more interesting.

Optionally: Heroic Fortune can be regarded as just another Talent, and can be expressed as a 3-rank talent. This can help to represent very lucky characters. This talent could be increased to rank 4 to gain two fortune dice on all talent rolls, or to 5 in order to have 3 fortune dice.
In the case where all players are getting Heroic Fortune as a bonus talent a character might want to further develop this. If a character wants a higher fortune talent at character creation he can swap out the 3-rank, replacing it with one of the 4's, or the 5 from their starting talent array. The 3 from the Heroic fortune bonus talent gets downgrade to a 2 rank talent and can be assigned to something else.
Upgrading a fortune talent costs 2 extra experience points. This is because this is one of the only talents that should ever effect all the rest of the a characters rolls.

[Joshua Kitz]

In a similar vein a new way to spend strainpints:

After a contest is rolled a character can expend 2 strainpoints to reset any dice in the conflict -- their own or their opponents.

[Joshua Kitz]

After doing some preliminary looking at probabilities in the game I think the Heroic fortune mechanic might well be much to powerful.

The strainpoint expenditure rule feels about right though.

[jmccarthy]

I like the idea of using strain points to reset one person's roll. Heroic fortune would be far too powerful.

[Joshua Kitz]

I'm glad you like it.

The game we played last wednesday was the first chance I really had to test it. (The last two times the game was played, once it got ignored and the other a GM was using a Screen so the reseting dice wasn't obvious or apparent, there were also 5 players).

But when we played with the Reset 1 die for 2 Strain rule last week, it seemed to work very well. It also seems to be an appriate cost. And got used by combatants on both sides (more then once). I've actually seldom had a battle be that even.

When you both used strain to downgrade that one attack, I felt it was a perfect example of why attacking multiple targets can be a bad idea.

Your right of course about the 'Heroic fortune' and while I might be tempted by someone who said they wanted a 4 or 5 talent to have the one dice they can reset if it comes up 1, it doesn't feel right. Its mechanics are just to divergent from how the rest of the rules work.
I don't think introducing that kind of difference is really desirable.